Kostas Tsoukalas, press spokesperson for Greece's main opposition party PASOK-Movement for Change, hit back at government spokesperson Pavlos Marinakis over Marinakis's criticism of an interview given by PASOK leader Nikos Androulakis at the Thessaloniki International Fair.
The fair, known in Greece as DEth, is held every September in the country's second-largest city and has for decades been the setting for the prime minister's annual keynote address on economic policy.
Tsoukalas said Marinakis appeared confused, as though he thought every politician behaved like Prime Minister Kyriakos Mitsotakis, who from the same podium in 2018 had promised to abolish the Katrougalos pension law and cut VAT across the board, then did the opposite once elected. The Katrougalos law, named after former labour minister Giorgos Katrougalos, overhauled Greece's pension system in 2016.
Tsoukalas said Mitsotakis instead applied the Katrougalos law to the letter, and even more harshly than it required, while turning VAT into a tool for state profiteering that secured excess profits for oligopolies at society's expense.
Fiscal cost claims
Tsoukalas accused the government spokesperson of pretending that protecting primary residences, restructuring the debts of good-faith borrowers and cutting working hours carried no fiscal cost.
He said the government had, in its own anxiety, effectively admitted that its central priorities were serving investment funds and entrenching a model of low productivity and cheap labour. He added that the government had already acknowledged in its own account of its time in office that pensioners' real income had fallen under its rule.
Corruption allegations
Tsoukalas said citizens knew that as long as New Democracy stayed in power, they would keep paying for what he called a corruption party unfolding under the aegis of the Maximos Mansion, the prime minister's office, and for contracts awarded directly without competitive tender. He told Marinakis that PASOK would leave him to play alone on what he described as the field of lies, distortion and toxicity.
He concluded that the countdown to political change had begun.
